Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster: App Developers Will Drive Demand For Apple Watch

The countdown for the release of the Watch from Apple Inc. AAPL has begun.

According to Piper Jaffray Senior Research Analyst, Gene Munster, it will be the app developers who will determine how many watches Apple manages to sell. Munster was on Bloomberg to talk about the Apple Watch.

Less Demand Than The iPad

“It’s going to be relatively small versus the iPad and think about these expectations, call it 20 million units, it’s going to be about half of kind of where the iPad was in its first year,” Munster said. “And so I think that modest expectations, I think a lot of consumers that we surveyed are still debating what the true value of the Watch is and I think developers will determine that over time.”

Developers Will Drive Demand

“The roadmap here is similar to what happened with the phone," Munster said. “The iPhone came out, it was marginally better. What really got it exciting for people is just that developers built apps that really changed your phone into a lot of different thing and that’s going to be the expectation with the watch, too, as the developers are going to actually build the true value.”

He continued, “And so for the consumer today, they are debating whether what’s the value, is it just the same as your phone, but as developers really optimize the short versus long look, which is an important distinction about this watch. There can be new experiences built on the watch that we haven’t seen yet. It’s up to those developers to really drive demand for the watch.”